There are big wishes for Signal to adopt the perfectly working Flatpak.
This will make Signal show up in the verified subsection of Flathub, it will improve trust, allow a central place for bug reports and support and ease maintenance.
Flatpak works on pretty much all Distros, including the ones covered by their current “Linux = Ubuntu” .deb repo.
To make a good decision, we need to have some statistics about who uses which package.
So… not using Signal because it’s based off a conspiracy theory that it’s secretly funded by CIA?
Well, let’s stop using RSA and encryption because the most used secure crypto algorithms today were created by none other than the NSA!
EDIT: None of the alternatives provided are good alternatives for Signal. Matrix is an extremely complicated protocol that lacks some features compared to normal IM apps (I use Matrix and the experience is quite close to a standard messaging app). XMPP is dead and has a very niche userbase. The others are not suitable for being a daily messaging app.
Signal is a good alternative and while I do agree with some points, they are not bad enough to prevent you from using it (e.g. not having usernames).
The appeal of signal is it is a good option (may have flaws but it is better than say discord) and it’s pretty easy to get normies using it, all the other alternatives you mentioned are obscure and convincing normies such as friends and family to use them is much harder, and while signal isn’t perfect, it’s certainly better than whatsapp or other proprietary solutions
Git clone
Cd [the clone]
[Text editor of choice] why_not_signal.md
[Exit text editor]
Cd …
Rm -rf [the clone]
They’re actually very good points.
The problem is that all the suggested alternatives are unworkable for adoption by the general public (they require stuff like Tor, self-hosting etc.)
Oh look an essay full of fearmongering that adds nothing to the discussion. Thanks for contributing!
